Remembering The Old Songs:

ROSE CONNOLEY (Laws F6)

by Lyle Lofgren

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, May 2003)

Morbidity sells: there's a channel on cable TV that seems to devote
itself mostly to murder trials. Traditional ballads are no exception,
and I haven't been upholding my reporting duties, because I've avoided
murders lately. To make up for it, here's a warhorse from both the
Old-Time and Bluegrass repertoire.

These words are from G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter's 1927 record,
Rose Conley, while the bluegrass versions all stem from Down
In The
Willow Garden, Charlie Monroe's 1947 cover of the Grayson &
Whitter version,
hopped up in typical Monroe fashion. If Charlie had promoted his band,
The Kentucky Partners, as aggressively as brother Bill promoted his,
KBEM might
be broadcasting Partner Saturday Morning.

This song is familiar to many of you, so I won't dwell on the
peculiarities of a true love who's almost as hard to kill as Rasputin,
but instead talk about how little we know about its origins. All the
recordings I've found are by people who had heard the 1927 G&W
recording. Folk Songs of the South, a collection of West
Virginia
songs edited by John Harrington Cox, prints a version collected in
1915, and says it was popular in the area in the 1890s. The murderer
gives a name (Patsey O'Railly) which indicates the song might be of
Irish origin. Some other key evidence (G&W's pronunciation of
"sabre" as sabree, for example) tells me it must have been
printed at some point,
perhaps by its author (I doubt any first-person criminal song was
really written by the perpetrator). No early printed copy has been
found, however -– maybe one is hiding in someone's piano bench.

The burglar's or burgalar's wine is most puzzling of
all.
Commentators
typically brush it off as a mishearing of burgundy, as did
Monroe,
but that doesn't make linguistic sense (enn and ell
sounds rarely
get confused), and the oldest (Cox) version serves merkley wine.
Some
scholars have suggested that burglar's wine is a term for
drugged wine.
That may be true, but no one that Bob Waltz contacted on the subject
could quote any source. Doped wine is the modus operandi of
partying
football players rather than burglars. Besides, the song says the wine
was poisoned, not just drugged. I searched likely words on the
internet, Webster's and Oxford dictionaries, and John Russell
Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (4th ed., 1889). This
last book
gave me a candidate: burgaloo, a popular pear variety at the
time,
identified in the dictionary as a variant of virgelieu.
Burgaloo wine
would be more at home in Virginia than imported burgundy. If you run
across any ideas about the mysterious wine or its vintage, let me know.
[See addendum below].

If the key is too low, capo up. G&W play the major sub-dominant
(F) chord shown,
while Monroe and almost everyone else play the more-uptown relative
minor (Amin) chord at the same places in the song. Let your conscience
be your guide.

Complete Lyrics:Down in the willow garden, where me and my love did meet,
Oh, there we sit a-courting, my love dropped off to sleep.
I had a bottle of the burg(a)lar's wine, which my true love did not
know,
And there I poisoned my own true love down under the banks below.

I drew my sabre through her, which was a bloody knife,
I threw her in the river, which was a dreadful sight.
My father always told me that money would set me free
If I'd murder that pretty little miss whose name is Rose Connoley.

He's sitting now in his own cottage door, a-wiping his weeping
eyes,
A-looking at his own dear son upon the scaffold high.
My race is run beneath the sun, low hell is now waiting for me,
I did murder that pretty little miss whose name is Rose Connoley.

Note added 2/28/2007: I was thrilled that someone did send me
more information about the song. I received the following message from
one Bob Moore:

Lyle,
I found your post about "Willow Garden" from 2003. You asked for the
origin of
the song. My Mother, who was born in 1900, sang this song to my family.
She
learned it from her father, John Duncan Sullivan, who was a wonderful
folk singer.
She remembered him singing it in her very early childhood; so it is at
least as old
as @ 1900. He told her it came from Ireland.

I was always interested in what the words meant in all of her
songs. She told me that
she had asked the same questions of her father. The Sullivan family was
of Scotch/
Irish descent. Her explanation of the song was that the man was of a
higher class than
Rose, and that she became pregnant. His father did not want him to
marry beneath
his class and encouraged him to kill Rose; since he thought that his
money and
position would buy the boy out of trouble.

As for the term "burglars wine"; she told me that in the olden
days,
travelers would stay at roadside inns at night. Crooked inn keepers
would dope wine to give to them so that when they went to sleep it
would be easy to steal their valuables. This makes sense in that the
songs murderer wanted to make
sure that she did not resist when he stabbed her. Even in my early
days, I am now almost
70, to poison someone did not necessarily mean to kill them. Looks like
a well planned crime.
In her version the last of the song was:

My race is run beneath the sun
Low hell is waiting for me
For I did murder my own true love
Whose name is Rose Conley

The term "low hell" refers to the 7 levels of hell. The lowest
being reserved for the worst crimes. What crime could be lower than
murdering one's own true love?

We were poor country folks in the late 1930s and 1940s when I
was young, and were quite isolated from other folks. There were 10
children. We had to make our own entertainment. The thing we loved the
most was my Mother's singing of numerous old songs, along with popular
songs of the 1920s and 1930s. I wrote down many of her songs before she
died in 1981. I only wish I had recorded them. She still had a
wonderful voice even into her 70s. Hope this helps.
Regards,
Bob Moore

This explanation makes so much sense that I changed "lo" to "low" in
the lyrics given above. I also asked Bob for more information
about his family background. His response:

Lyle,
As best as we can determine our ancestor Henry Sullivan or (O'Sullivan)
came to Pennsylvania in 1746. Probably from County Cork. He was a
peasant farm worker or maybe a servant type. There is evidence that he
was a servant to a Samuel Flowers to whom he was in servitude for 4
years
to pay his passage to the new world. His offspring migrated to
Tennessee
around 1800 and settled in Green County. For an absolute certainty we
know our family decended from a Henry Sullivan who was born in
Pennsylvania around 1788. He and his wife moved to Bledsoe County,
TN by 1815. The family spread into White, Warren and Van Buren
Counties. My Grandfather, John Duncan Sullivan, was born in 1868, in
rural White or Warren County, TN. My mother was born at Bone Cave,
Van Buren County, TN in 1900. Much of the family started west in
covered
wagons in 1906; but illness plagued them shortly after departure and
they
ran out of money. My Grandfather worked in a limestone quarry in
Sherwood,
Franklin County, TN. This is in the Crow River Valley near the Alabama
border.

My Grandfather and 4 others of the family are burried there. I
suspect, though
I have no evidence, that this song had it origin in Ireland. Many of
the other
songs he sang came from there. My mother said that he told her he
learned the
songs from his mother. If that is so, the song would date to at least
before his
birth date.